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EVERY AGE creates its own Shakespeare.
What is more important here is to remember that stage plays, unlike novels, memoirs, or lyric poems, have no single point of view, and no narrative voice. The play can be entered from many different perspectives—
Indeed, it is one of Shakespeare's brilliant gifts as a dramatist to provide, in almost every case, a credible contrary argument, onstage, to what might seem to be a prevailing viewpoint.
When in the Induction the cross-dressed page tells Sly, “I am your wife in all obedience” (Induction 2.104), the question of wifely obedience is already put in play—especially when the first thing this “wife” does is disobey her “husband's” peremptory command,
Shakespeare lived and wrote during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the granddaughter of Henry Tudor, the Richmond of Richard III, who would become Henry VII.
Shakespeare's Richard III is arguably the first fully realized and psychologically conceived character in his plays.
Richard is the supreme egotist, and his world is all within himself. He speaks rhetoric, rather than simple truth, even to himself.
And yet in the very next scene we see him “prove a lover”—the thing he says he cannot do—under the most difficult circumstances possible. He proposes marriage to the widow of a man he has had murdered. He does so in the presence of the corpse of her father-in-law. And his proposal is accepted.
The use of twinned scenes with different outcomes is a favorite structural device for Shakespeare throughout his career.
But however resonant these character types may be in human life or were, at least, among Freud's patients, it is a mistake, I believe, to attribute the malevolence of Shakespeare's Richard to “congenital and infantile disadvantages.” That is his claim, to be sure, but the claim functions more as an excuse and as a metaphor than as a convincing interior motivation.
His ancestry here is multiple, for while in history he is descended from Richard of York, in theatrical terms he derives from the Machiavel and the Vice, both of which are types (though perhaps archetypes rather than character types) to which Richard explicitly compares himself in this play.
But then I sigh, and with a piece of scripture Tell them that God bids us do good for evil; And thus I clothe my naked villainy With odd old ends, stol'n forth of Holy Writ, And seem a saint when most I play the devil. 1.3.323–324, 332–336
Richard of Gloucester, Richard III, is in fact a new kind of character for Shakespeare, a character with a complex, fully developed, and internally contradictory “personality”—in short, a character conceived in terms recognizable from the standpoint of modern psychology. This, of course, is one reason Freud found him fascinating. Richard is also “modern,” or at least appealingly “early modern,” in his interest in, and use of, the language of economics, profit and loss, and wager.
Readers familiar with Shakespeare's late plays will see the strong similarities, and equally strong differences, between this underwater vision and that described in Ariel's second song in The Tempest, where again we find skulls and jewels beneath the sea, but imagined as free from the macabre terror of death that seizes upon Clarence: Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. The Tempest 1.2.400–405
The device of the predictive dream that comes true is a common one for the literature of the period, and indeed is prevalent in medieval and early modern theories of dreams and dreaming. Most striking, perhaps, from the point of view of Shakespeare's brilliant dramaturgy, are the hints strewn throughout this passage of Clarence's subconscious awareness that Richard means him harm, even as his conscious mind struggles to insist that Richard must, surely, love him. “Methoughts that I had broken from the Tower,” he tells Brackenbury, the Lieutenant of the Tower: And was embarked to cross to
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No index of disorder in the play's world is more telling, though, than Richard's increasing loss of control over various modes of language. It is not that he cannot speak—to the last he is charming, splenetic, vehement, and eloquent, by turns—but that his language does not transform others, or himself, as once it did.
In an important sense the ghosts are entering not only the stage, or the field, but also the mind. These are psychological prompting, embodied guilt and embodied memory.
As the stage direction instructs, “Richard starteth up out of a dream.” And the dialogue of the two voices, which in earlier scenes was deployed as a way of fooling others, now moves inside Richard, and manifests itself as another kind of civil war: What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by. Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I. Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am. Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason. Why? Lest I revenge. Myself upon myself? Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good That I myself have done unto myself? O no, alas, I rather hate myself For hateful deeds
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5.3
The real war is now staged within Richard, rather than between him and his rival for the throne.
The portrait of Richmond we get here is, I think, deliberately faceless, without character and virtually without personality, in distinct contrast to the colorful, seductive, and consistently fascinating Richard.
